They (9 page)

“You were no more than eight or nine when you moved to Carlisle Street,” Lillian said. When he and his mother moved to Carlisle Street in Toronto, they’d settled into a two bedroom apartment in a lower-middle class neighborhood. Lillian had lived in the apartment downstairs and was the building manager. Once Maggie found out Lillian was an evangelical Christian, the two women had become fast friends. “If you were eight when you and your mother left California, you probably wouldn’t have remembered that much.”

“I thought she would have mentioned more to you about our past life,” he said. He looked at Lillian wearily, realizing it was only noon and he had the rest of the day to make funeral arrangements. He felt worn out. “But she didn’t say anything, not even in passing?”

“No.” Lillian shook her head. She tried to muster a smile, perhaps in an attempt to put him at ease. “I tried asking a few times, but she never revealed more than what I just told you. And that her parents were dead.”

“Her parents were dead,” Vince echoed.

“Yes.” Lillian looked at Vince with concern. “Are you okay, Vincent?”

Vince turned to her. He was gazing out the screen door again. “What? Oh, I’m fine.”

“Will you need any help making funeral arrangements?”

“I suppose I will.” He hadn’t really given it much thought until now, but then who knew his mother better than Lillian Withers? “I’m supposed to claim her body this afternoon at the Lancaster County Morgue.”

“Why don’t I call Reverend Powell and see if we can arrange something? Do you have any particular plans in mind?”

“No.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon making funeral arrangements for Maggie Walters.

LONG AFTER VINCE Walters left her house, Lillian Withers still couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that she almost lost her composure when Vince asked if Maggie had told her anything about her past besides what Vince already knew.

She’d never been a very good liar. How Vince swallowed that one, she would never know.

She sat in the easy chair, her Bible opened to Revelations. It was ten-thirty p.m., and the night was warm. It had climbed to ninety degrees today and it was close to seventy now. A very comfortable evening. They’d spent the day making Maggie’s funeral arrangements, then had gone out to dinner at a steakhouse called Hoss’s and Vince filled her in on what he’d been up to. Graduating top of his class at the University of California in Irvine with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Economics and a double Masters Degree in Economics and Business. He was the Director of the Western Division at Corporate Financial and was doing quite well. With the exception of losing his young wife, Laura, almost a year ago to that horrible car accident, life had been pretty good to Vince Walters. The Lord had blessed him.

Or had He? Lillian skimmed through the Bible, thinking about all that Vince told her. First the loss of his wife, which he was still trying to get over, and now this. Lillian would never wish something like that on her worst enemy. Not that she had any, but she couldn’t fathom it anyway. It was all so horrible. She fully understood now why Vince had broken down earlier that day. She supposed it was perfectly all right for him to not mourn Maggie’s death. She hadn’t been much of a mother to her son in the last few years before he’d left for college. Vince had every right to feel some sort of resentment toward Maggie. Lillian only hoped he would find it within himself to be able to forgive his mother.

Lillian traced her finger down the pages of the Bible, finally stopping at Chapter 20, verse 7. She read the verse aloud to herself. “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—to gather them for battle.” She paused, reading through the rest of the passage to herself. Then she closed the Bible and looked out the window into the night beyond. “When the thousand years are over,” she murmured. There were many that believed the thousand years hadn’t started. There were others who believed that the thousand years was almost at an end, right now in these final years of the twentieth century. Maggie hadn’t subscribed to that belief. She’d held the opinion that the Beast was alive and well in this country and that his time was close at hand. This belief had taken root more strongly in the last ten years, and within the last few years she’d been almost paranoid about it. It got to the point that she’d almost had her phone unplugged because she thought the Beast was going to call her in the middle of the night to tell her that he was going to claim her as his own. Her fear had been so insistent that Lillian had convinced her to talk to Reverend Powell about it. But the talk with the Reverend hadn’t done much to calm Maggie of this fear. The best Lillian had been able to do was convince Maggie to buy an answering machine. “This way you can screen your calls,” she’d told Maggie, trying to sound as serious as possible. “You can pick it up if you recognize the voice coming through. That way if the Beast
does
call you, he won’t actually be
talking
to you. He won’t be able to get you.”

Surprisingly, Maggie had fallen for it and it was then that Lillian began to fear for her friend’s sanity. Maggie had always been strong-willed and God fearing, but her fear of the approaching of Armageddon and her insistence that it was coming sooner than they thought had really gotten to her the last few years. Lillian even talked to Reverend Powell about it in an effort to lay her fears to rest and the Reverend hadn’t shown the least bit of worry. “Maggie is simply preparing for what the Lord has told us is bound to come,” he’d said. “She may be a little more…
impassioned
about it than most of us would be, but then she’s a very passionate woman. Her walk with the Lord is the strongest I’ve ever seen in a Christian.”

Lillian had agreed. Maggie’s walk with the Lord was certainly one to try to emulate. But Maggie’s behavior still nagged her.

The tip of the iceberg had been when Vincent asked about Maggie’s past.

Lillian sighed and put the Bible on the coffee table. She felt bad about lying to Vince, but she had to. It was the only thing she could think of until she thought about what to do.

Now she had the time to think about it.

The box…

She didn’t know how long ago it was now, but it had to have been in 1987 or 1988. Well over ten years ago. She’d been over at Maggie’s house helping to arrange the knick-knacks on the new shelves she’d installed in the living room. It was spring and the two women had been talking about the latest lesson from church services the week before. Lillian was embroiled in the subject, which concerned Mark’s account of how Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple, when she noticed Maggie was gone. Lillian stopped what she was doing, turning to try to find her, when Maggie called out. “Lillian?”

Lillian had turned toward the hallway and saw Maggie near the doorway to her bedroom. Maggie beckoned to her and Lillian had gone into the bedroom, wondering what her friend wanted. And that’s when Maggie showed her the box with the padlock.

“I want you to promise me something, Lillian,” Maggie had said. Her breath was bated, as if she was asking Lillian to contemplate something that was on a grandiose scale. Robbing a bank. Or stealing secret documents. Maggie kept looking around the room, as if to keep reassuring herself that they were the only two people in the room.

“What is it?” she’d asked.

Maggie lifted the box up and jiggled the lock. “I’m going to bury this box in my garden. It will be approximately ten feet from where the concrete of my back porch ends, dead center from my back door. It will be buried two feet down. I want you to promise me that if I should die—”

“
What
? Maggie what are you
talking
about?”

“If I die,” Maggie continued, ignoring her protests, “I want you to promise me you’ll dig this box up. I’ll give you the only key. You will keep the key in a safe place. If something happens to me, you will dig up the box. You will take it to a safe place and open it. Read the documents I have placed inside it.”

“Maggie—”

“Then take them to Reverend Powell. Do not take them to anybody else.
Especially
my son if he shows up.”

“Maggie, this is ridiculous! I don’t understand—”

“You will when you open the box. Now do you promise?”

They’d gone back and forth like that for a good ten minutes before Lillian had given in. She promised Maggie she would unearth the box, and that she and Reverend Powell would read what was inside. Maggie had given her the key, and without another word she put the box back in her room. When she returned to the living room she wouldn’t speak of her request. She’d never spoken of it in the years that passed. When Lillian asked, all Maggie would say was that she couldn’t say anything about it
now
. She was afraid to. But when the time came, Lillian could find out for herself and then God help her.

She’d talked to Reverend Powell about it in the privacy of his home office and he’d listened to her carefully, twirling the corncob pipe he always carried with him but never smoked. He’d been a smoker back when he lived a life of sin, and even though he no longer touched tobacco, the habit of putting a pipe to his lips was an old vice. Lillian saw it as a familiar reminder of his older, dirtier habit, and if the Lord chose to help Reverend Powell rid himself of that habit by making it impossible to give up fiddling with the pipe itself, so be it. When she finished, Reverend Powell put the pipe on his walnut desk and kicked his feet up, lacing his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair. He was staring up at the ceiling in contemplation. “Perhaps the items she has in that box are the holdovers from her past life. Her life before she was saved.”

Lillian thought that was the case, but the way Maggie had been so feverishly incensed when she’d asked her to do this bothered her. “You should have seen her,” she’d told Reverend Powell. “It was like she was asking me not to tell anybody that she’d gotten drunk at the local bar and hit on a CIA agent who was in town, and that her brief affair with him resulted in her finding out who
really
shot JFK.” Reverend Powell chuckled at that scenario and Lillian cracked a grin herself. “I guess that’s a crazy way of putting it, but that’s how it
seemed
. She acted like she had the world’s…wickedest secret in that box.”

“To her it probably
is
the world’s wickedest secret,” Reverend Powell said. “The sins of one’s past life can put a tremendous burden on our walks with Christ if we do not shed them. I’ve no doubt that Maggie has shed her sins through Christ, but why she would keep the mementos of those sins, I can’t say.”

“So you really think that’s what they are?” Lillian had asked. “Newspaper clippings maybe, or old photographs of the person she used to be?”

“Of course,” Reverend Powell said. He’d pulled his feet off the desk and sat forward. He was a big man, but gentle. His voice, which was a deep booming baritone, could be surprisingly mellow and soothing. “We won’t know what she has in that box until the day has come when what she has asked us to do comes to pass. But if it puts your mind at ease, it’s my sincere belief that all it carries is probably pictures of her past life, maybe an old scrapbook or phone book. Maybe there’s information on her family in it.”

“She’s never talked about her family at all,” Lillian said.

“Maybe she has a reason not to. Maybe they…treated her badly at some point in her past. Neglected her, abused her. Maybe they were heathens. And the reason she’s keeping this material is because the blood tie is strong. Only the Lord knows. And I think we should respect her wish.”

That had been the end of it. She’d never asked Maggie about the contents of the box, and she never brought the subject up with Reverend Powell again. On the morning they learned Maggie had been murdered, her mind went back to that afternoon over a decade ago when Maggie made her promise to dig up the box and she’d cast her eyes over at Reverend Powell, who was consoling Mary Rossington in her grief. Reverend Powell’s eyes met hers over Mary’s curly-topped head and held them. They were both thinking the same thing. The time had come for that box to be unearthed.

Lillian rose from her chair and went to the kitchen. She went to the closet where she kept her garbage can and fished around. Her fingers grasped the handle of a shovel and she pulled it out, hefting it in her hand. It was almost eleven o’clock, but she didn’t feel the least bit tired. The key was taped to the pages of a Bible that Maggie had given to her as a gift a year before, but there was no need to retrieve it yet. Nor did she feel like waiting until tomorrow to fulfill her end of the promise she’d made. She pulled open one of the drawers of the countertop and pulled out a heavy flashlight. She turned it on. The beam was strong. She turned the flashlight off and carried both tools to the living room. She set the shovel down, leaning its handle against the wall, and put the flashlight on a small end table. Then she grabbed her tennis shoes and put them on. When her shoes were on, she grabbed the flashlight and shovel and was just about to exit the house by the back door when a hand clamped over her mouth and strong arms yanked her back in the house.

Her heart leaped in her throat as she was spun around. A man she didn’t recognize stood in front of her and she could sense another man behind her, his hand still clamped over her mouth. The man in front of her was holding a piece of duct tape. “We need to talk,” he said, as he stepped forward and deftly covered Lillian’s mouth with the tape.

Oh my God, it’s the same men that killed Maggie
! Lillian’s mind shrieked. She knew this was the case even as the man behind her guided her into the living room. Her eyes grew wide as she entered the living room as her gaze lit across a third person in the house. A young woman with blond hair, her features pleasant, wholesome, all-American. The woman looked up with anticipation.

“Sit.” The man behind her barked, and strong hands pushed her into a chair. She looked up at the two men, her adrenaline pumping through her veins. She felt suddenly hot in the claustrophobic closeness of her little home.